[Plplot-devel] Next version and soname numbers

[Rafael L. <lab...@ps...>]

Alan and I (and Joao, occasionally) have been working on polishing the rough
edges of the Autotools configuration system of PLplot.  If you are listening
to plplot-cvs, you will see that a lot of commits have been done lately.
Most of them concerned the AT configuration, but there was also the
inclusion of a new driver ("mem", to be used by the PDL bindings) and some
improvements in the documentation.

Alan scheduled the next release for April.  It is still a little bit too
early, but I would like to discuss about the next soname and release
numbers.

First, the soname.  Since the API changed (inclusion of plsmem) but is
backward compatiblity with the latest release, the version-info string
should be updated to 8:0:3. In Linux, we will end up with libraries like
lib*.so.5.3.0. This may be different for other platforms.

As regards the next PLplot version number, I would suggest 5.2.1 if nothing
radically new happens to the CVS sources until April.  Almost all changes
that are now in CVS are transparent to the user, most of them concern just
the configuration scheme.  We should not make a greater bump like 5.3.0,
because this would create the false expectation of lots of new features
added, which is not the case.

If nobody objects, I will change the SOVERSION value in configure.ac as
indicated above.  Of course, this may change before the next release.

-- 
Rafael